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With the success of Bodyguard, Jed Mercurio has cemented his reputation as the most successful writer working in television today. Viewing figures that exceeded 10 million and acres of broadsheet coverage confirm that Mercurio has achieved the rare distinction of being both a commercial and critical success: only Sally Wainwright (Happy Valley, Last Tango in Halifax) comes close.

But Mercurio has been plying his trade for the 25 years. It’s not been a slow burn exactly, but it has been a respectably steady rise to the top, combining palpable hits and the odd failure.

Mercurio is not from the comfortable background that dominates his industry; you could argue that he continues a great tradition of working-class TV writing that includes Dennis Potter, Alan Bleasdale and Jimmy McGovern). He was born in 1966 and grew up in Cannock, Staffordshire, the son of Italian immigrants. His father was a miner and his mother sometimes worked as a machinist and they fiercely anglicised themselves in what Mercurio has described as an undiverse community.

Family life was ordinary, perhaps because both parents had escaped from a war-torn country out of economic necessity and knew the importance of domestic security, being keen to distance themselves from the jeopardy that had been part of their upbringings.

It is notable that Mercurio rarely writes about family, and when he does (think of David Budd’s home life in Bodyguard) it always serves a grander and more dynamic dramatic arc.

Unlike most aspiring writers, Mercurio was not someone who found his voice in creative writing assignments in English classes. His first love was science and as a teenager he harboured serious ambitions to be an astronaut. Eventually he trained to be a doctor at the University of Birmingham and he intended to specialise in aviation medicine. He obtained a flying badge with the RAF and flew fixed-wing aircraft which he would try to land as hard as possible. You can’t imagine Stephen Poliakoff doing that. Mind you, there is an adrenaline in Mercurio’s writing which often bursts out spectacularly from the tightly controlled plots. In his early writing for TV, notably in Cardiac Arrest (1994-1996) you could argue there is a recklessness, an irresistible provocation that is intent on upsetting status quo.

This drama, set in an NHS hospital, was blistering, cynical and on occasion very funny. Mercurio had always felt that medical fiction was misleading and wanted to create a show which reflected his own experiences. Originally he had responded to an advertisement in the British Medical Journal when the BBC was looking for advisers for a hospital drama, but Mercurio soon found himself scripting his own.

Television wasn’t his natural habitat, as he explained to Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs last year. “Because I wasn’t a gushing luvvie people took things the wrong way, and I was used to a much tougher environment where you rarely give credit where it’s due. You just point out the things that aren’t right and I discovered that is not how you get on in the media.” He did, however, meet his partner, Elaine Cameron, a producer and script editor through the media. In an opaque first date that reads like something from one of Mercurio’s scripts, she thought he had invited her out to discuss work; he thought it was a romantic rendezvous. They now have two children.

Of course, Cardiac Arrest created a storm. TV viewers had been used to seeing nurses as administering angels and the series’ litany of taboo subjects – racism, sexism, homophobia – was too much for some to stomach. But it was a ratings hit and many professionals loved it, too. In a 1999 survey of British doctors, 15 per cent voted for Helen Baxendale’s Dr Claire Maitland as the medic they would most like to be compared with.

But not everyone was happy. Virginia Bottomley, the then-health secretary compared it to a Carry On film and there was even a rumour that the BBC cancelled it after its third series following pressure from John Major’s government. Still, Mercurio had made his mark and he abandoned his medical career to write full time.

What happened next is harder to fathom. Rather than create another scabrous drama, Mercurio wrote a sitcom. The Grimleys (1997-2001) was set in Mercurio’s native Black Country in the Seventies, and mined his own boyhood. Boosted by a strong cast that included Samantha Janus, Brian Conley and Amanda Holden, The Grimleys fared better than most ITV comedy and ran for three series. Watching it now, it stands up rather well, perhaps because its retro setting means that it was less slavish to the attitudes of the time.

Retro fun: the cast of The GrimleysCredit:
ITV

Mercurio’s attempts at drama during this period were rather less successful. Invasion: Earth (a science fiction thriller) and The Legend of the Tamworth Two (based on the true story of a pair of renegade pigs) came and went, and Mercurio began a parallel career as a novelist. The first of these, Bodies (2002), formed the basis of his next big TV hit. Again set in an NHS hospital, it was a slick drama about thwarted idealism and catastrophic incompetence spiced up by some notably graphic operation scenes. The series won Best Drama Series at the Royal Television Society Awards in 2005.

The journey to the first series of Line of Duty in 2012 was not, however, straightforward. His present-day version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for ITV in 2007 was not particularly well-received and his work on Sky 1’s Strike Back (although a success for the channel), based on the novels of Chris Ryan, hardly distinguished itself as a piece of cultural erudition.

Hardly highbrow: the cast of Strike BackCredit:
Sky

Indeed, it is sometimes hard to remember that Mercurio doesn’t always have the Midas Touch. Another attempt at medical drama, Critical (again for Sky, 2015) sank without trace, while a 2015 adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (featuring none other than Richard Madden as the priapic Mellors) caused consternation among those who couldn’t believe the liberties Mercurio had taken with DH Lawrence’s original. In his two-star review for the Telegraph, Jasper Rees wrote: "mostly the novel seemed to have been locked in the cellar, only for rare stabs of authentic Lawrence to show up and embarrass the mostly invented dialogue”.

By this stage, of course, Mercurio had shown his true worth. The success of Line of Duty, following the investigations of AC12, a fictional anti-corruption unit, was immediate and it became BBC Two’s most-watched drama for a decade. Its qualities were obvious from the start, showing shades of Mercurio’s writing which we have now grown accustomed to: a vice-like grip of character, a penchant for labyrinthine plot and a trust in the audience as regards fiendish complexity. It was with the second series, however, and the introduction of Detective Inspector Lindsay Denton (played with an impressive mixture of grit and sadness by Keeley Hawes) that the show became a considerable talking point. Line of Duty’s authenticity is not in question, so it’s notable that Mercurio received little in the way of co-operation from the police force when he created the show.

“We specifically didn’t receive assistance where other programming does,” he later revealed. “The start of series one features a counter terrorism unit shooting dead an innocent man … We sent the script to the Met and they said they wouldn’t do that kind of thing.”

Although realism is essential to Line of Duty, it also has rather less noble intentions. Mercurio’s cleverness was never in doubt but with this and Bodyguard he has proved that he is a writer whose central mission is to entertain. We have had explosions and assassination attempts which have been masterminded with a pace that puts most Hollywood thrillers in the shade. And that, clearly, is what viewers want.

The narrative of Mercurio’s life has had its own twists and turns, but it’s nothing compared to what he delivers on-screen. We will await his next project with bated breath.